South Asian Journal of Tourism and Heritage (2010), Vol. 3, No. 1 © 2010 South Asian Journal of Tourism and Heritage The Colonial Tourist: Seeking the Picturesque in Pre-Mutiny Delhi JYOTI P. SHARMA* *Jyoti P. Sharma, Ph.D., Reader in Architecture, Department of Architecture, Deenbandhu Chhotu Ram University of Science & Technology, Murthal Haryana, India ABSTRACT The colonial tourist, an avid 19 th century traveller, travelled to the colony in search of the unknown and the unexplored. The colony was experienced via a prism of the tourist’s own cultural context with the Picturesque being a dominant ideal of aesthetic appreciation in the metropolitan culture. This Paper examines the experiences of the 19 th century colonial tourist in pre-Mutiny Delhi in the Indian Subcontinent. It is argued that the Picturesque, a colonial import to the Subcontinent, was idealised as the colonial tourist wandered around taking in the myriad sights in and around the city, particularly Delhi’s ruins. Indeed, it was the city’s ruins more than anything else that whetted the appetite for the exotic. Delhi’s pre-Mutiny tourist gaze shaped the city’s post-Mutiny cultural landscape as ruins became monuments to be viewed in manipulated architectural and horticultural settings of archaeological and municipal parks. KEYWORDS: Colonial Tourist, Pre-mutiny, Architecture and Archeological Parks INTRODUCTION Emma Roberts, a 19 th century British lady visiting her sister in India travelled to Delhi, the city she referred to as never failing to ‘impress the mind with sensations of mingled awe, wonder and delight.’ (Roberts, 1837: II, 214). Roberts was one among the many travellers who set out from their homeland in search of the unknown and the unexplored Other 1 . Equipped with a cultural sensibility that was completely at odds with the environment they aspired to negotiate, Roberts and other 19 th century European travellers headed towards the colonies for an experience of the exotic. European colonial enterprise facilitated the colonial tourist (the word tourist was not in vogue in the 19 th century with an itinerant European being referred to commonly as a traveller) through industrialised transport means and logistical support during the course of their travel in the colony. While travelling as a means of seeing the world beyond the sheltered confines of one’s own cultural matrix is by all means a pre- colonial enterprise, the colonial tourist stands out among the large and variegated assortment of travellers from across the ages. For one, this group far outweighed the others in sheer numbers and two, European travellers published accounts of their travel in very large numbers exhibiting a variety of literary and scholarly skills leaving behind a rich repository that shed light not only on the object of their interest but also on their own political, social and cultural makeup that became an apparatus for sightseeing in the colony. The 19 th century colonial tourists’ accounts were extensively published as memoirs, travelogues, diary entries, letters, novels, musings and official correspondence as well as drawings, painting and cartography and later photography for the benefit of those arm-chair travellers who could then vicariously partake of the experiences. Since a first-hand account of the tourists’ experience is denied to us, it is these modes of representation, both textual and visual, that they used to capture their experiences that facilitate a reconstruction of their experiences. 2 This Paper has drawn on this rich collection of records to portray the colonial tourists’ journey in search of the Picturesque. The Paper explores the experience of the 19 th century colonial tourist who toured 19 th century Delhi following its occupation by the British in 1803 and prior to the outbreak of the uprising of 1857 immortalised as the Mutiny in the colonial context and referred to as the first war of independence in post-independent India. It is argued that the colonial tourists’ way of seeing transcended the ocular processes to form a multilayered entity where the baggage of their cultural context as well as the cultural complexity of the other encountered each other. The argument underscores the Orientalist discourse by affirming the Saidian position that the colonial tourist applied western aesthetic